Doris Bohrer has died. She worked as a CIA agent, joining its forerunner the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) to defeat the Nazis. She wanted to be a fighter pilot but they wouldn’t let women do that job. So Bohrer joined the CIA – as a typist. She rose through the ranks to become the CIA’s highest ranking woman.

Her Times obituary contains a gem for anyone worried about what to do when confronted by sexism.

…Bohrer and her female colleagues were treated with near-universal condescension. Men doing the same work were addressed by their military rank; the women were dismissed as “the girls”… Indignant at the the sexist language of the mess hall, she at one point placed a fake hand grenade on the table at which she and a group of officers were eating. One of the men offered, loftily, to take the grenade and make it safe, at which point she pulled the pin. The men scattered, leaving Bohrer to finish her meal in peace.

And that’s how you deal with sexism.

Doris Bohrer, CIA agent, was born on February 5, 1923. She died of heart failure on August 8, 2016, aged 93

Marry Anne Noland’s obituary was published in Virginia’s The Richmond Times. She’d rather die than vote for Clinton or Trump:

NOLAND, Mary Anne Alfriend. Faced with the prospect of voting for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, Mary Anne Noland of Richmond chose, instead, to pass into the eternal love of God on Sunday, May 15, 2016, at the age of 68.

Oliver Sacks has died. The metastatic melanoma finally took the life of the great neurologist and writer. He was 82.

Dr Sacks, most famous, perhaps for his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat – a look a case studies of peculiar brain patterns; the book’s name derived from the man who really could not differentiate between a hat and his wife – and Awakenings, which recounted Sacks’ work at New York’s Beth Abraham hospital with survivors of a forgotten 1920 epidemic of sleepy sickness.

“I would like to talk about ‘Sleeping Beauty’ and ‘Swan Lake,’ about my battements and my handsome partners,” wrote ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, who has died at the age of 89. “But whichever way I look at my childhood, it all revolves around politics and Stalin’s terror.”

Her New York Times’ obituary tells us:

Her father was shot to death in 1938 in Stalin’s purges. (Ms. Plisetskaya learned the date of his death only in 1989.) Her mother was arrested and sent to a labor camp with her infant son, then exiled to Kazakhstan….

Ms. Plisetskaya was… restricted by the Bolshoi’s rigid Soviet guidelines on choreography, which viewed the very movement of dance through the prism of ideology, yet she was able to infuse stultified, literal movements with much deeper meaning….

“I danced all of classical ballet and dreamed of something new,” she said. “In my time, it was impossible.”

Art matters.

But it was a career that was far from plain sailing. She first sparked scandal in 1967 after a meeting in Moscow with Cuban choreographer Alberto Alonso, who, as a citizen of a friendly communist country, was allowed to create for her the Carmen Suite.

“Carmen – where every gesture, every look, every movement had meaning, was different from all other ballets … The Soviet Union was not ready for this sort of choreography,” Plisetskaya said. “It was war, they accused me of betraying classical dance.”

The obituary notice for Dorothy A. “Stella” Scrobola tells of a “unique, caring individual who touched the lives of all who knew her.” Stella is mourned and celebrated by her six children and many, many grandchildren:

Years later he went on a bender in Saigon and woke up the next day in a ditch outside a tropical city. Only when he had walked some way into it did he discover on inquiry that the city was Singapore. How he had got there was never explained.

THE Economistgives Osama bin Laden the obituary of a poet. For a man who loved death, Osama sure took a lot of time hiding:

Somewhere, according to one of his five wives, was a man who loved sunflowers, and eating yogurt with honey; who took his children to the beach, and let them sleep under the stars; who enjoyed the BBC World Service and would go hunting with friends each Friday, sometimes mounted, like the Prophet, on a white horse. He liked the comparison. Yet the best thing in his life, he said, was that his jihads had destroyed the myth of all-conquering superpowers.